The Cruelty is the Point, Part the Etc
By 
Will it shock you that Republican attacks on reproductive care make their own voters sick and dead? No, no it will not.
Rural communities in huge swaths of the country don’t have an obstetrician-gynecologist, said Charlotte M. Lee, a resident in the obstetrics and gynecology program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. As a medical and public health student at Brown University, she researched ways to better integrate abortion services into primary care medicine.
“What I had been told, or what I had seen, was only OB-GYNs or nurse-midwives really provide this type of care, then I went to medical school and my world was totally opened up in realizing that family doctors are providing this care all across the country,” Lee said, stressing that she was speaking from her professional experience and not on behalf of her institution.
As a medical student, Lee said she did a rotation at an abortion clinic, where she met family doctors and asked if they performed the procedure in their practices. Some did. Others did not. Curious about the divergence, she interviewed primary care doctors throughout New England.
What she found, according to the study published in August in the medical journal Contraception, was that a mixture of explicit and implied institutional policies, government regulations, stigma and friction among medical specialties kept primary care doctors from being able to provide patients with full-spectrum reproductive care.
“This is not complicated medicine,” she said.
It is, however, controversial.
….
The care Mabel Wadsworth provides is controversial because offering full-spectrum reproductive care means performing abortions, along with prenatal and postpartum care. So, despite the center’s founders being given keys to the city, the clinic is not welcomed by all.
A small group of “antis” regularly pickets the clinic, where patients spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety. Many of the small-town family medicine doctors who work on “clinic days” when abortions are performed travel from more than 75 miles away and don’t broadcast their work at Mabel Wadsworth in their home communities, which are more conservative than Bangor. Here, storefront window displays in downtown show support for abortion rights.
“Abortion has been sort of siloed in the sexual and reproductive health world, which is not helpful,” McDonald said.
Research shows in an ideal maternal health system, women would have access to comprehensive and seamless medical care — and not just when they show up pregnant but before, during and after pregnancy. That often doesn’t happen in the United States, which among high-income nations is the worst place to give birth, especially for Black, Native American and rural women.
An ideal maternal health system? For Republicans, this is the ideal maternal health system!